Colin Andrew, who has died aged 79, was a gifted artist, a dedicated socialist and a decent, principled man with a gift for friendship and a wry wit.

He was born in Dundee to working-class parents who were both Tories. He started work as a teenager at the DC Thomson newspaper and comics publishing firm in his home town and Bill McCail's Mallard Features Studio in Glasgow. His first published work was in Lilliput magazine and in the local newspaper. Colin was entirely self-taught but his gifts were recognised by his fellow cartoonists early on and it was from one of them that he came to his lifelong commitment to leftwing politics.

After doing his national service in the RAF in his late teens, Colin moved to Kentish Town, north London, and spent the rest of his life in the area. He worked for the King-Ganteaume company, for whom he produced historical and western drawings for the L Miller and Son publications Pancho Villa and Rocky Mountain King. He met his future wife, Janet Quesnel, through mutual friends and they married in the early 1960s.

Colin was employed by a number of publications including Zip (for whom he did the Captain Morgan strip), the Daily Express (for whom he worked on the Jeff Hawke strip), the New English Library (for whom he did many book covers) and the comics Buster, Boys' World, Eagle, Lion and Tiger.

Colin was a member of the Kentish Town Communist party but he sided with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute of the 1960s. This led him and Janet to go to China in 1965. They ended up in the south-west province of Sichuan teaching English. Later they moved to Tientsin (now known as Tianjin) in northern China, and ultimately to the capital Beijing.

That was at the height of the Cultural Revolution and, faced with the closure of all the schools, they decided to return to London in the late 1960s. Colin worked in this period for a variety of publications including the Doctor Who Magazine, for which he did strips, while also developing his considerable gifts as an oil painter. He drew cartoons for the campaigning Camden New Journal from its inception in the 1980s. Though Colin ceased to be politically active, he never wavered from his socialist principles or forgot whose side he was on.

Although he and Janet had led separate lives for a number of years, they remained close. She and their daughters, Catriona and Shona, survive him.